Will Obama Inspire a New Generation of Organizers, a piece written by Peter Dreier and originally published in Dissent Magazine, appeared in The Huffington Post on Tuesday evening. Dreier, a professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College (and also teaches a class on community organizing), details the effect Sen. Obama, a former community organizer, is already having on the Millennial Generation:

• “There has not been a candidate since Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy who has inspired so many young people to become involved in public service and grassroots activism.”
• “The number of young people seeking jobs as organizers has spiked in the past year in the wake of Obama’s candidacy.”
• “Obama, through his own example, has already dramatically increased the visibility of grassroots organizing as a career path, as well as a way to give ordinary people a sense of their own collective power to improve their lives and bring about social change.”

Here, Dreier appears to be correct, and not necessarily over-optimistic. Having been an organizer in the past—becoming one quite by accident as I had no idea the job had existed before I had it—I’ve seen that Sen. Obama’s Presidential candidacy has brought to a greater consciousness that there exists a career centered specifically on personal empowerment and mobilizing social change. My parents and peers are now more familiar with what community organization is and entails than when I was an organizer myself.

Dreier also outlines the history of community organizing in America. Obama openly acknowledges the great Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky as an inspiration, which leads right-wing bloggers to loosely draw parallels between the Chicago organizer, the Illinois Senator, and, of course, Communism [see: "Saul Alinsky - yet another Obama mentor from his Marxist past"]. Dreier, however, illustrates the tradition’s more-substantial, three-dimensional history:

• “The roots of community organizing go back to the nation’s founding, starting with the Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party.”
• “Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was impressed by the outpouring of local voluntary organizations that brought Americans together to solve problems, provide a sense of community and public purpose, and tame the hyper-individualism that Tocqueville considered a threat to democracy.”
• “Historians trace modern community organizing to Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago in the late 1800s and inspired the settlement house movement. These activists—upper-class philanthropists, middle-class reformers, and working-class radicals—organized immigrants to clean up sweatshops and tenement slums, improve sanitation and public health, and battle against child labor and crime.”
• “In the 1930s [...] Saul Alinsky, took community organizing to the next level. He sought to create community-based “people’s organizations” to organize residents the way unions organized workers.”

Finally, Dreier imagines the Organizer-In-Chief, and how this role could be leveraged to better leverage a platform and elicit constituent action:

• “Obama can certainly learn valuable lessons from President Franklin Roosevelt, who recognized that his ability to push New Deal legislation through Congress depended on the pressure generated by protesters and organizers.”
• “Roosevelt became more vocal, using his bully pulpit—in speeches and radio addresses—to promote New Deal ideas.”
• “[Obama] understands that his ability to reform health care, tackle global warming, and restore job security and decent wages will depend, in large measure, on whether he can use his bully pulpit to mobilize public opinion and encourage Americans to battle powerful corporate interests and members of Congress who resist change.”

And finally, Dreier suggests that Obama’s inspiration can be used to put on pressure to reform – even his own platform:

• “But if it appears that he is veering too far to the political center, they will—inspired in part by Obama’s own example, and perhaps with his covert support—mobilize to push him (and Congress) to live up to his progressive promise.”

Again, Dreier is not over-optimistic or too-simplistic in his assessment. Community organizers and anyone generally excited or inspired by seeing a collective of people make something happen have reason to be excited, as their craft is being highlighted by a presidential candidate – specially one that has already inspired a young generation. Throughout my elementary school life, there always seemed to be ploys to make reading look cool via posters featuring endorsements by Spider-Man, Tom Hanks, Patrick Ewing, and others. It seems that now, however, considering how empowered different communities feel resulting from Obama’s candidacy, his is the best enforcement that community organization will get.

It it especially interesting to think of the president-organizational community role Dreier outlines, patented after Franklin Roosevelt and some of his constituents. After nearly three decades of presidencies that have celebrated individualism, imagining the constituent, or organized collectives of constituents as players rather than passive bystanders is exciting. Further, I very much appreciate the suggested interchangeable role of the constituent as an agent for platform change (using the “bully-pulpit” to mobilize collective action in response to climate change issues, war attitudes, gas prices, etc) and keeping the President’s (and Congress’s) platforms in check with reality (as we’re presently seeing Sen. Obama’s netroots supporters do with regard to his stance on FISA).

-Filed in Ideas